The Developmental Assessment of Social Communication Ability (DASCA): initial creation and psychometric description.
The 184-item DASCA caregiver survey is ready for clinical piloting to baseline and track social-communication skills while awaiting independent validation.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Kaat et al. (2025) built a new caregiver survey called the DASCA. It has 184 items that map social-communication growth in children.
Parents fill it out to show how their child talks, plays, and reads faces today. The team checked if the questions work the same for different kids.
What they found
The survey hung together well. Items did not favor boys over girls or white over Black families.
That means scores can be trusted to track change, but the tool still needs a second, fresh sample to be sure.
How this fits with other research
Whitehouse et al. (2014) did this first. Their 25-item Autism Impact Measure proved parents can spot change in core ASD traits. DASCA widens the lens to pure social-communication and adds 159 more items.
Tde Wit et al. (2024) also made a short 25-item tracker. Their ASDQ covers broad autism signs, while DASCA zooms in on social talk and play. The two tools do not clash; they serve different jobs.
McClain et al. (2025) dropped a 2025 twin named SCIPS. Both scales ask caregivers, yet SCIPS rates how often skills happen and how important they feel. DASCA is built to show growth over time, not just frequency.
Why it matters
You now have a long, change-ready survey to baseline and follow social-communication skills. Use it at intake, after six months of intervention, and at yearly reviews while we wait for more validation.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The dearth of tools to quantify and track growth in social communication ability has been a barrier to understanding and monitoring treatment outcomes for neurodevelopmental disorders. We undertook a multi-staged, multisite study to create the Developmental Assessment of Social Communication Ability (DASCA), a new measure explicitly developed as a clinical outcome assessment for monitoring change—both over the course of development and in response to treatment. The DASCA is a caregiver-report instrument created using a mixed-methods approach. Qualitative components of this approach included focus groups and cognitive debriefing interviews. Quantitative components included dimensionality analysis, differential item functioning, and item response theory modeling. The item bank was iteratively refined to assess social communication skills that are typically acquired by early- to middle- childhood. The final DASCA item bank contains 184 items. Expressive language was a major factor in determining the appropriateness of some items for certain groups of children. Negligible differential item functioning, primarily by age, was observed for some items. However, impact analyses determined that this differential item functioning did not meaningfully impact overall scores. Given that sample size limitations prevented us from using separate samples for exploratory and confirmatory phases of modeling, it will be important to gather additional validity evidence in independent samples, especially as the current data were collected during the COVID-19 pandemic. The DASCA holds promise as an outcome measure for assessing changes in social communication ability. Ongoing development efforts include creating a computer adaptive test administration to allow for serial assessments using different item sets to yield a consistent score that is sensitive to change. The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s13229-025-00683-z.
Molecular Autism, 2025 · doi:10.1186/s13229-025-00683-z